american

As the section editor for The Queer Experience, I invite you to submit a chapter proposal for consideration to be included in The American Research Handbook on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, an edited scholarly volume that examines the evolving role of diversity, equity, and inclusion within American democracy and educational institutions.

The Queer Experience section seeks rigorous, thoughtful, and evidence-based analyses that examine gender identity, sexuality, intersectionality, and the evolving role(s) of queer people in society at the present moment.

1956 was a year of theatrical milestones. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night was published posthumously while The Diary of Anne Frank won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And, of course, the American Society for Theatre Research was founded. O’Neill’s meditation on troubled family dynamics and addiction would go on to win the Pulitzer in 1957. The previous year, the Pulitzer went to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a Tennessee Williams play about alcoholism and (potentially) sublimated queer desire. In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway when A Raisin in the Sun premiered.

The American Literature II: Literature after 1870 Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) is seeking proposals for this year’s in-person convention in Chicago, Illinois. This year’s theme for the conference is “After the Archive”; accordingly, the Permanent Section encourages presentations that focus on the notion of the archive. Some questions to be considered in context of American literature after 1870 are:

Call for Papers // Society of Early Americanists // 2027

“Queer Humors”

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, Call for Papers for Volume 9

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual is the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the 2015 edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays.

All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot’s work as a poet, critic, playwright, editor, foremost exemplar of modernism, or his influence on twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture.

Call for Papers

In the Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood makes a clear distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction: the former concerns events that could not happen; the latter draws on developments that could happen or that have already occurred in some historical form. The distinction was publicly contested, including in an exchange with Ursula K. Le Guin, and Atwood insists her terminology was descriptive rather than hierarchical. She places The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) within the speculative category on the grounds that nothing in the novel exceeds documented historical precedent (Atwood 5–6). This conference takes Atwood at her word.

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Re-Viewing Black Mountain College Conference, to take place in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2-4. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

Call for Papers

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2026 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 25-27, 2026

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 30, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: April 27, 2026

Panel Stream: Early American Forms and Formalisms This panel stream interrogates formalism in early American literature following a postcritical turn in the field. One result of literary studies’ recent postcritical turn has been renewed attention to aesthetics, feeling, and form as essential aspects of literary analysis. In early American studies, this reassessment has taken a distinctive shape, particularly in work that foregrounds the formal and aesthetic dimensions of literary culture across the long eighteenth century — from special issues and essay collections (Looby and Weinstein; Cahill and Larkin; Pethers and Koenigs; Pethers and Couch) to monographs (Armstrong and Tennenhouse; Koenigs, Couch, Tawil, Gardner, Garrett).

The Comparative American Ethnic Literature session at the 2026 PAMLA Conference in Seattle, WA seeks proposals for papers (about 15-20 minutes in length) related to a wide variety of topics regarding multi-ethnic texts, relationships between multi-ethnic writers, and/or connections among ethnic and religious communities. While proposals may engage with this year's conference theme of “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," the session is open to broad interpretations and explorations of the field, including considerations of historical period, geographic area, genre (including film and music), gender and sexuality, bi- and multi-lingual texts, and so on.

In light of the recent resurgence in scholarly work on the writings of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, we are proposing an MLA volume on “Approaches to Teaching the Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.” Freeman’s oeuvre is extensive, and her work intersects with queer studies, disability studies, animal studies, food studies, Gothic studies, ecocriticism, labor history, and more. The MLA will decide whether to commission a book based on the quality and quantity of survey responses, so if you are a scholar who engages Freeman in the classroom, we would appreciate it if you would complete the survey. If you are interested in contributing to this volume, we also invite you to submit a proposal.

Panel Title: New Perspectives on the Federal Writers’ Project in the American West

Dates: August 26–29, 2026

Location: Eugene, Oregon

Deadline for Submissions: Friday, March 27, 2026

Contact Email: Noreen.Rivera@utrgv.edu

Panel Description

In the late oughts and 2010s, critical and cultural theory across the humanities embraced the power of positive thinking. If we paid lip service to the determinations of (neo)liberal modernity, our thinking nonetheless gathered with feverish intensity around all that was said to escape or exceed its iron cage. Those of us tutored in assembling a historical ontology of ourselves turned to dreams of possible futures – or else to cultural practices and lifeways whose onto-epistemic difference enacted futurity in the midst of a seemingly endless now. This politics of utopian adjacency crystallized in a now-familiar set of keywords: affirmation, futurity, speculation, utopia, worldmaking, and (of course!) the ever-popular injunction to imagine otherwise.

This is a guaranteed panel for the MLA's Teaching of Literature Forum.  This roundtable discusses experiences and pedagogical approaches to teaching literature under authoritarianism and state violence widely conceived. Panelists discuss whitewashing and erasing literary histories, global efforts at repressing liberatory literacy, heightened classroom surveillance, teaching anti-fascist literature, and more.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 27, 2026

Please send 250-500-word abstracts and CVs to Danica Savonick (danicasavonick@gmail.com ) and Brandi Locke (blocke@udel.edu).